Blog

Raquel took a class in agro-ecology in Monteverde, Costa Rica 20 years ago that changed the course of our lives. This video is a fun look at our history, including lots of photos of us in college in the early 90s. It's short on details of

HOW we farm, but it has good insight into WHY we farm. Plus, it was filmed during Greg's short-lived "beard phase" last summer!

Win one of our rice/almond gift boxes! We're having a slogan contest--comment here or on our Facebook page with your most creative, funny idea for selling rice at a farmers market. How would you get customers to approach our market stand? We'll pick our favorites and send gift boxes to the top three entries--a $25 value! Photos of your sign ideas welcome! Good Luck!

We started almond harvest today with our "new" shaker and a crew of 5 helpers. Normally almonds are shaken onto the ground and then swept up after drying on the ground for about 10 days. This is very efficient, but the tractor-mounted sweepers make a terrible amount of dust! We're shaking the nuts onto tarps, which are then dumped into carts. We take the nuts to an area out of the orchard to dry, then pick them up using shovels and rakes. It's more labor intensive to do it this way, but creates more jobs and MUCH less dust! This is our first year harvesting with a mechanical shaker, but it's going well, and in the end I think it will be just as efficient as fully mechanized harvesting. Note in the video that harvest takes only one minute per tree!

Ever since we started grinding our wheat berries into flour, our family's favorite breakfast has been whole wheat pancakes. We use a simple recipe from a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, scaled up for our family of 7 of course! Here's the basic recipe, which makes about 12-15 pancakes. We triple it and usually end up with 40 or more, which the kids promptly devour! I often add an extra couple of eggs from our home flock of chickens, just to add a bit more protein. Enjoy!

Whole Wheat Pancakes

1 cup Massa Organics whole wheat flour

1 tablespoon brown sugar, packed

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 beaten egg

1 cup milk

2 tablespoons cooking oil

In a mixing bowl stir together flour, brown sugar, baking powder, and salt. In another mixing bowl combine egg, milk, and cooking oil. Add to flour mixture all at once. Stir mixture until blended.

Combine dry ingredients, then mix in 2 cup cool water until theconsistency of cookie dough; let the dough autolyze (sit for a while whilethe gluten forms), then knead; roll into baguettes and coat with poppyseeds; bake 25 minutes at 400°F.

Raquel and I are featured in a new video series called "Earthbound: Created and Called to Care for Creation" from Seraphim Communications. Well, actually Mason and Lily, our 4-year-olds, are the stars of the show, but we're in it too. Earthbound is an educational DVD funded in part by the Lutheran Church (ELCA). The producers, who did a masterful editing job, were kind enough to post our segment online so that we could use it. It provides a really great overview of what we do and why. Check it out!

And if would like to see the rest of the Earthbound series, it is available for purchase at the Seraphim Communications website.

Looking for a unique food gift for someone in your life? How about a Massa Organics gift box of our great tasting farm products? Our Rice & Almond gift box contains one 2-lb bag of the "best brown rice" (Saveur magazine), one jar of our addictive almond butter, and a half pound of our delicious roasted almonds. We also have an Almond gift box, containing one jar of almond butter and one pound of roasted almonds. We sell both gift boxes on our website for $25 each. Happy Holidays!

Many people are asking for transparency in our food system these days, wanting to know how their food was produced. This has long been one of our goals as well. We have been working to reconnect our farm to the community, so that you know who produced the food you buy from us. In that spirit, here is a short video I shot this summer of our young pekin ducks foraging in our organic rice field. Turn up the sound and listen to them. This is a production system that allows the ducks to fully express their "duckiness," as opposed to how most ducks are raised: in confinement barns with no access to swimming water. We think this is better.

As a side note, we started this experiment of raising ducks in the fields because we had a section of the field that had a very thin stand of rice. It wasn't a big enough area to bother replanting, so it seemed like a good opportunity to try this duck production system. The rice plants in the rest of the field are much denser than what you see here.